EARLY, MANDATORY, PRAGMATIC PROCESSING

The experiment reported in this paper used a delayed same/different se ntence matching task with concurrent measurement of eye movements to i nvestigate three questions: whether pragmatic plausibility effects are restricted to certain phrasal environments, how rapidly such effects are shown in on-line sentence processing; and whether they are a produ ct of optional, high-level, inferential processes. The results clearly show that plausibility effects ave not restricted to low-level phrasa l units and that they appear to arise as a necessary consequence of th e process responsible for deriving basic sentence meaning. The rapid a nd highly localized nature of the effects supports a view of sentence processing involving incremental interpretation of the earliest availa ble syntactic representations. We argue that the apparently mandatory nature of plausibility effects, coupled with their insensitivity to re petition context presents difficulties for both modular and interactiv e views of sentence processing.